This New York startup thinks it's created the Rotten Tomatoes rival that movie studios have been asking for

Love it or hate it, Rotten
Tomatoes has completely shifted how movies are marketed.

Over the summer, the review aggregator website proved just how
much of an influence it has on general audiences as Sony
strategically lifted the review embargo on "The Emoji Movie"
so close to when it opened in theaters that its eventual rotten
score didn't completely destroy the movie's opening weekend box
office figures.

Rotten Tomatoes has been a thorn in the side of studios and
directors for years, as they feel a low score on the site
unfairly gives the perception that it's a bad movie. But Avi and
Joshua Stern think they've come up with an app that's both a
personalized online movie recommendation service while also a
modern tool studios can use to drill-down how to spend
advertising dollars.

caption

MovieGrade founders (L-R) Joshua and Avi Stern.

source

Avi Gill/PLUS1

MovieGrade is an
app that gives its users a more personalized selection of movie
titles to see compared to others like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb.
After answering a few questions about your likes of movies,
genres, and actors, you are instantly given movies that the app
believes you'd like to see. You can then begin grading and
sharing grades with your friends.

It's been out of Beta for a few months, and in that short time
has gained a loyal following by cinephiles, but what the brothers
are really focused on currently is grabbing the attention of
studio marketing departments, believing their app (available on
iOS, Andriod by end of November) can offer better personalized
data.

"We just kind of got sick and tired of seeing all these rating
platforms like Rotten Tomatoes that just gave us average
percentages and we thought to ourselves, in this day and age,
with technology being so advanced and so fast, how does something
not exist that learns my actual tastes and take that into
consideration when recommending movies for people to see," Joshua
Stern told Business Insider.

Joshua, who founded two apps before creating MovieGrade, and Avi,
a movie producer, teamed with Boris Rabinovich as their CTO to
build the algorithm in the app, which also lets you do a filtered
search on all the titles available on major streaming services -
a rare find on most apps and sites.

The startup has found in a short amount of time in the business
that studios are starving for better data on what audiences want.
As the general thinking for decades in Hollywood has been to
spend millions to blanket the world with marketing on its
blockbuster releases, the Sterns are trying to get the marketing
heads to understand that, in today's world, getting the loyal
fans leads to a groundswell.

"We're ready to disrupt the market," Avi Stern said. "For
advertising it's all personalization, so why should you market a
movie to me that I have no inclination of seeing. Joshua loves
Matt Damon, I'm going to market him Matt Damon movies, I'm not
going to market him a scary clown movie knowing that he hates
horror movies."

caption

"mother!"

source

Paramount

This is not to say
that all movie studios and distributors don't do targeting
marketing. They do. But the Sterns believe with MovieGrade they
can specialize while also expanding the marketing. In the case of
"mother!," which received an "F" grade through CinemaScore - a
company that conducts exit polling of wide releases during
opening weekends - MovieGrade can go into its database and
instantly target not just people who love "Rosemary's Baby"-like
horrors or Darren Aronofsky movies, but also fans of Jennifer
Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer.

"Right now studios are kind of just walking in the dark and it's
not a knock on them, it's because the platforms don't have any
targeting data for users," said Joshua.

MovieGrade will soon be able to prove itself to the Hollywood big
wigs. The Sterns say numerous studios and independent
distributors have asked if they can use their app at upcoming
preview screenings. With the use of the app, marketers will
instantly know the tastes of the people in the theaters, instead
of combing through piles of written cards (which are usually
passed out to audience members at the start of these kind of
screenings).

The latest feature MovieGrade is pushing out is less
business-to-business and more for the general consumer. It's
called "Blend." The idea is that this will be a remedy to the
indecision that often comes when friends or significant others
try to agree on something to watch.

"It allows users to add different friends into their group on the
app, they then just hit a button that says 'Blend,' and it
automatically starts analyzing all the taste profiles in that
group and shows you movies in theaters and on demand that you
collectively would want to see," said Joshua.

Here's how Blend works:

Jeff Bock, senior box office analyst at Exhibitor Relations, says
the movie business needs to take on more services that are
attractive to the next generation. And something that can compete
with Rotten Tomatoes isn't bad, either.

"Rotten Tomatoes oversimplifies reviews, and sometimes that does
a disservice to the film and film community," Bock told Business
Insider. "That said, studios have no problem blasting their
advertising campaigns with positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes,
but maybe MovieGrade can offer an alternative."

"We're here to reinvent the word-of-mouth screening," Avi said.
"When studios complain to us and vent how Rotten Tomatoes can
literally ruin a movie before it even comes out based on reviews
where those reviewers just hate the genre that movie is in, we
want to help them find the people who do love that genre so they
can get their movies in front of those people."